CoinDesk reports that "A project is in the works to make the Tor Client more adaptable and easier for third parties to use, with some help from Zcash Open Major Grants (ZOMG)." ZOMG announced on Tuesday that it is awarding the privacy-focused Tor Project a $670,000 grant to continue to develop Arti, a Rust coding language implementation of the Tor Client... Arti should make it simpler for third parties to embed and customize the Tor Client than the current implementation in the C coding language... "Arti is a project to make an improved version of Tor that will be more reliable, more secure, and easier for other software to use," said Nick Mathewson, chief network architect and co-founder of the Tor Project. "We hope that within the next several years, Arti will become the preferred implementation of the Tor protocols...."

"Onion routing has just had its 25th anniversary in May, and although Tor is a great set of privacy tools, the C program 'tor' itself (note the lowercase t) is beginning to show its age," Mathewson said. "We've found over the recent years that the complexity of the existing C code, and the fragility of the C language, make it unnecessarily difficult to improve the code while maintaining our security and privacy guarantees....

"Roughly half of Tor's security issues since 2016 would have been impossible in Rust, and many of the other issues would have been much less likely, based on our informal audit," he said...

The funding will go toward developer salaries as they develop Arti. Mathewson said the goal with this round of funding is to advance Arti to the point where it is ready for general use, testing and embedding.

SD Times takes another look at the uptake of Java 11 Previous reports of the Java community found that developers were still mainly using Java 8 and didn't adopt newer versions, but according to Snyk's JVM Ecosystem Report 2021, that is starting to change. This year, 61.5% of respondents are using Java 11 somewhere in production, and almost 12% are using the latest release, which was Java 15 during the survey. "This is huge, because it shows that developers do upgrade their Java version beyond Java 8 to some extent. The mantra that most Java developers are comfortable staying on Java 8 seems to be slowly breaking apart," Snyk stated in the report.

However, half of the Java 11 users — which is currently the most used version — still use Java 8 in their production stack...

In addition, almost half of developers (44%) use the free AdoptOpenJDK distribution in production as one of their JDKs and 48% use it in development.
"Other findings are that Java is still by far the most popular language by a long shot and Snyk stated it will probably remain that way in the foreseeable future and that JetBrains IntellIJ IDEA still remains dominant as an IDE in the Java ecosystem."

The TIOBE index of programming language popularity celebrates 20 years of continuous publishing this month. Started as a hobbyist project back in 2001, the site estimates each programming language's popularity by counting search engine results for the phrase <language> programming (indirectly counting each listing for developers, courses, and third-party vendors).

When it was started 20 years ago, the top languages were Java, C, and C++.

20 years later, the top languages are now C, Java, Python, and C++

And "The difference between position 1 and position 3 is only 0.67%." This means that the next few months will be exciting. What language is going to win this battle? Python seems to have the best chances to become number 1, thanks to its market leadership in the booming field of data mining and artificial intelligence.
ZDNet also noted the trends: Searches for C were down 4.83 percentage points compared to last July. Java searches were down 3.93% over the period, while Python gained 1.86%.

The top 10 languages behind C, Java and Python are C++, C#, Visual Basic, Javascript, PHP, Assembly Language, and SQL.
But they also have this to say about TIOBE's calculations: It's a different methodology to developer analyst RedMonk, which looks at language usage on software projects hosted on GitHub and discussions on the developer Q&A site, Stack Overflow.

RedMonk's Q1 2021 rankings place JavaScript in top place, followed by Python and Java.

Other interesting moves this month:

• C++ gained more than 0.5% getting closer to the top 3
• Rust rose from #30 to #27
• Go rose from #20 to #13
• TypeScript rose from #45 to #37
• Haskellrose rose from #49 to #39

Reactions are starting to come in for GitHub's new Copilot coding tool, which one site calls "a product of the partnership between Microsoft and AI research and deployment company OpenAI — which Microsoft invested $1 billion into two years ago." According to the tech preview page: GitHub Copilot is currently only available as a Visual Studio Code extension. It works wherever Visual Studio Code works — on your machine or in the cloud on GitHub Codespaces. And it's fast enough to use as you type. "Copilot looks like a potentially fantastic learning tool — for developers of all abilities," said James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk. "It can remove barriers to entry. It can help with learning new languages, and for folks working on polyglot codebases. It arguably continues GitHub's rich heritage as a world-class learning tool. It's early days but AI-assisted programming is going to be a thing, and where better to start experiencing it than GitHub...?"

The issue of scale is a concern for GitHub, according to the tech preview FAQ: "If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future. We want to use the preview to learn how people use GitHub Copilot and what it takes to operate it at scale." GitHub spent the last year working closely with OpenAI to build Copilot. GitHub developers, along with some users inside Microsoft, have been using it every day internally for months.

[Guillermo Rauch, CEO of developer software provider Vercel, who also is founder of Vercel and creator of Next.js], cited in a tweet a statement from the Copilot tech preview FAQ page, "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before."

To that, Rauch simply typed: "The future."

Rauch's post is relevant in that one of the knocks against Copilot is that some folks seem to be concerned that it will generate code that is identical to code that has been generated under open source licenses that don't allow derivative works, but which will then be used by a developer unknowingly...
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has responded to those concerns, according to another article, arguing that training an AI system constitutes fair use: Friedman is not alone — a couple of actual lawyers and experts in intellectual property law took up the issue and, at least in their preliminary analysis, tended to agree with Friedman... [U.K. solicitor] Neil Brown examines the idea from an English law perspective and, while he's not so sure about the idea of "fair use" if the idea is taken outside of the U.S., he points simply to GitHub's terms of service as evidence enough that the company can likely do what it's doing. Brown points to passage D4, which grants GitHub "the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time." "The license is broadly worded, and I'm confident that there is scope for argument, but if it turns out that Github does not require a license for its activities then, in respect of the code hosted on Github, I suspect it could make a reasonable case that the mandatory license grant in its terms covers this as against the uploader," writes Brown. Overall, though, Brown says that he has "more questions than answers."
Armin Ronacher, the creator of the Flask web framework for Python, shared an interesting example on Twitter (which apparently came from the game Quake III Arena) in which Copilot apparently reproduces a chunk of code including not only its original comment ("what the fuck?") but also its original copyright notice.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Kevin Modzelewski and his colleagues at Dropbox set out to create Pyston in 2014, they had a very simple objective: to lower the costs of running Python code on Dropbox's servers, by making the code itself faster. "We were growing exponentially, so our server cost was growing exponentially," Modzelewski tells TechRepublic. "If we could get Python running faster, we would spend less money running Python." The original cost reduction initiative at Dropbox snowballed into a bigger project for Modzelewski when the company moved away from Python in 2017 and cancelled the Pyston project. He had realized while working on the language that there was a strong demand for faster Python among the developer community, and while there were plenty of tools around for improving the performance in smaller applications, there were none designed for big, business logic-type applications such as Dropbox.

"There's a lot of tools out there for helping you run Python faster, but there weren't any that were a good fit for Dropbox's use case," says Modzelewski. "This was an area of the Python market where a lot of money was being spent, but not very many tools were being developed for helping. It was under served." Fast forward to today and Pyston is now in version 2.2, and has been open-sourced, with Modzelewski and fellow developer Marius Wachtler now leading the project as co-founders. The latest implementation promises a 30% performance improvement over Python 3.8.8, with a key benefit being that developers can simply drop their Python applications into Pyston and get going, without having to rewrite their code. It's also a "completely separate thing" to what Modzelewski and fellow developers built for Dropbox some seven years ago.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced an artificial intelligence system that can recommend code for software developers to use as they write code. From a report: Microsoft is looking to simplify the process of programming, the area where the company got its start in 1975. That could keep programmers who already use the company's tools satisfied and also attract new ones. The system, called GitHub Copilot, draws on source code uploaded to code-sharing service GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, as well as other websites. Microsoft and GitHub developed it with help from OpenAI, an AI research start-up that Microsoft backed in 2019.

Researchers at Microsoft and other institutions have been trying to teach computers to write code for decades. The concept has yet to go mainstream, at times because programs to write programs have not been versatile enough. The GitHub Copilot effort is a notable attempt in the field, relying as it does on a large volume of code in many programming languages and vast Azure cloud computing power. Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, describes GitHub Copilot as a virtual version of what software creators call a pair programmer -- that's when two developers work side by side collaboratively on the same project. The tool looks at existing code and comments in the current file and the location of the cursor, and it offers up one or more lines to add. As programmers accept or reject suggestions, the model learns and becomes more sophisticated over time. The new software makes coding faster, Friedman said in an interview last week. Hundreds of developers at GitHub have been using the Copilot feature all day while coding, and the majority of them are accepting suggestions and not turning the feature off, Friedman said.

mrflash818 writes: The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) -- parent organization of the better-known Let's Encrypt project -- has provided prominent developer Miguel Ojeda with a one-year contract to work on Rust in Linux and other security efforts on a full-time basis. Rust is a low-level programming language offering most of the flexibility and performance of C -- the language used for kernels in Unix and Unix-like operating systems since the 1970s -- in a safer way. Efforts to make Rust a viable language for Linux kernel development began at the 2020 Linux Plumbers conference, with acceptance for the idea coming from Linus Torvalds himself. Torvalds specifically requested Rust compiler availability in the default kernel build environment to support such efforts -- not to replace the entire source code of the Linux kernel with Rust-developed equivalents, but to make it possible for new development to work properly. Using Rust for new code in the kernel -- which might mean new hardware drivers or even replacement of GNU Coreutils -- potentially decreases the number of bugs lurking in the kernel. Rust simply won't allow a developer to leak memory or create the potential for buffer overflows -- significant sources of performance and security issues in complex C-language code.

"Google said Thursday it's funding a project to increase Linux security by writing parts of the operating system's core in the Rust programming language, a modernization effort that could bolster the security of the internet and smartphones," reports CNET: If the project succeeds, it'll be possible to add new elements written in Rust into the heart of Linux, called the kernel. Such a change would mark a major technological and cultural shift for an open-source software project that's become foundational to Google's Android and Chrome operating systems as well as vast swaths of the internet. Miguel Ojeda, who's written software used by the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator and worked on programming language security, is being contracted to write software in Rust for the Linux kernel. Google is paying for the contract, which is being extended through the Internet Security Research Group, a nonprofit that's also made it easier to secure website communications through the Let's Encrypt effort.

Adding Rust modules to the Linux kernel would improve security by closing some avenues for hackers can use to attack phones, computers or servers. Since it was launched in 1991, Linux has been written solely in the powerful but old C programming language. The language was developed in 1972 and is more vulnerable to hacks than contemporary programming languages...

Google credits the Linux community programmers who began the Rust for Linux project. "The community had already done and continues to do great work toward adding Rust support to the Linux kernel build system," Google said in a blog post...

[Rust] has been the most loved programming language for five years running in Stack Overflow's annual developer survey. "Rust represents the best alternative to C and C++ currently available," Microsoft's security team concluded in 2019. The team said Rust would have prevented memory problems at fault in 70% of its significant security issues. And because Rust's checks happen while software is being built, the safety doesn't come at the expense of performance when the software is running.

The goal of the Linux on Rust project isn't to replace all of Linux's C code but rather to improve selective and new parts.

Google said Thursday it's funding a project to increase Linux security by writing parts of the operating system's core in the Rust programming language, a modernization effort that could bolster the security of the internet and smartphones. From a report: If the project succeeds, it'll be possible to add new elements written in Rust into the heart of Linux, called the kernel. Such a change would mark a major technological and cultural shift for an open-source software project that's become foundational to Google's Android and Chrome operating systems as well as vast swaths of the internet.

Miguel Ojeda, who's written software used by the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator and worked on programming language security, is being contracted to write software in Rust for the Linux kernel. Google is paying for the contract, which is being extended through the Internet Security Research Group, a nonprofit that's also made it easier to secure website communications through the Let's Encrypt effort. Adding Rust modules to the Linux kernel would improve security by closing some avenues for hackers can use to attack phones, computers or servers. Since it was launched in 1991, Linux has been written solely in the powerful but old C programming language. The language was developed in 1972 and is more vulnerable to hacks than contemporary programming languages.

From today's edition of Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: This week, Docker announced some changes to Docker Hub Autobuilds — the primary one of interest being that autobuilds would no longer be available to free tier users — and much of the internet let out a collective groan to the tune of "this is why we can't have nice things...!"

"As many of you are aware, it has been a difficult period for companies offering free cloud compute," wrote Shaun Mulligan, principal product manager at Docker in the company's blog post, citing an article that explores how crypto-mining gangs are running amok on free cloud computing platforms. Mulligan goes on to explain that Docker has "seen a massive growth in the number of bad actors," noting that it not only costs them money, but also degrades performance for their paying customers. And so, after seven years of free access to their autobuild feature, wherein even all of you non-paying Docker users could set up continuous integration for your containerized projects, gratis, the end is nigh. Like, really, really nigh, as in next week — June 18.

While Docker offered that they already tried to correct the issue by removing around 10,000 accounts, they say that the miners returned the next week in droves, and so they "made the hard choice to remove Autobuilds...." For its part, Docker has tried to again stave off the criticism, offering users a discount on subscriptions, and offering members of its open source program the ability to continue to use autobuilds for free...
Docker says they've also changed Autobuild "to take advantage of BuildKit by default for improved build performance," increased the number of parallel builds for subscribers, and increased the build instance types, "so you get a beefier machine to build on!" While the changes were apparently inspired by their struggles with cryptocurrency miners, "All of these improvements should see a faster and more stable build experience with lower queue times..."

"We really appreciate your support and the community's understanding as the whole industry battles against these abusive few."

A new extension for Microsoft's code-editing tool, Visual Studio Code, "allows you to open, edit, and commit back to source-control repos without having to clone them on your local machine," explains a new video.

A Microsoft blog post calls it "a new experience that we've been building in partnership with our friends at GitHub to enable working with source code repositories quickly and safely inside VS Code." In VS Code, we've offered integrated support for Git from the very beginning, and we've been supporting many other source control management (SCM) providers through extensions. This has allowed developers to clone and work with repositories directly within VS Code.

However, a large part of what developers do every day involves reading other people's code: reviewing pull requests, browsing open-source repositories, experimenting with new technologies or projects, inspecting upstream dependencies to debug applications, etc. What all of these have in common is that as a first step, you usually clone the repository locally and then open the code in your favorite code editor (which we hope is VS Code!). Yet, cloning a repository takes time, may lead you to review an outdated version of the repo if you forget to pull, and can sometimes be a security risk if you're unfamiliar with the code. The new Remote Repositories extension, published by GitHub, makes the experience of opening source code repositories in VS Code instant and safe. With this, you can quickly browse, search, edit, and commit to any remote GitHub repository (and soon, Azure Repos) directly from within VS Code, no clone necessary!

You can work on as many repos as you like without having to save any source code on your machine. Remote Repositories saves you time and local disk space and empowers you to stay entirely within VS Code for all your source control tasks.

For the first time, you can code, iterate and build apps on the iPad itself. 9to5Mac reports: Using Swift Playgrounds on iPadOS 15, customers will be able to create iPhone and iPad apps from scratch and then deploy them to the App Store. It remains to be seen how limited or not the development experience will be. It is probably notable that Apple chose not to rebrand this as "Xcode," signifying that you aren't going to be able to do everything you can do with Xcode on the Mac. TechCrunch highlights some of the other new features available in iPadOS 15: iPadOS 15 retains the overall look and feel of the current iPad operating system. The updates in the new OS are mostly centered around multitasking. The iPad's widget support gets a big update with iPadOS 15. The widgets are larger, more immersive and dynamic. And, iOS's App Library is finally available on the iPad, where it tweaks the overall user experience. The feature, added to the iPhone in 2020, presents the user with an organized view of the apps on the iPad.

Also added to iPadOS 15 is a new multitasking system. Called Split View, a drop-down menu at the top of the screen unlocks several multitasking, multiwindow options. The system seems much smoother than the current multiscreen option on iPad OS, which is clunky and hidden. With Split View a feature called Shelf makes it easy to switch between different screens and screen grouping.

A new column in Inc. argues that 14 years ago, Steve Jobs sent the most important email in the history of business — a one-sentence email to Bertrand Serlet, the company's senior vice president of Software Engineering, that's just recently been made public (through Apple's trial with Epic): It reveals a conversation about the things Apple needs to be able to accomplish in order to allow third-party apps on the iPhone. Until that point, the iPhone only ran 16 apps pre-installed on every device. Jobs had famously said told developers that if they wanted to create apps for the iPhone, they could make web apps that ran in Safari... Except web apps aren't the same as native apps, and users immediately set about finding ways to jailbreak their devices in order to get apps on them.

Apple had really no choice but to find a way to make it possible to develop apps through some kind of official SDK. Serlet lays out a series of considerations about protecting users, creating a development platform, and ensuring that the APIs needed are sustainable and documented. The list only has 4 things, but the point Serlet is trying to make is that it is important to Apple to "do it right this time, rather than rush a half-cooked story with no real support."

Steve Jobs' reply was only one sentence long: "Sure, as long as we can roll it all out at Macworld on Jan 15, 2008."

That's it. That's the entire response.

Serlet's email is dated October 2, 2007. That means Jobs was giving him just over three months... Three months to do what the software engineer no doubt believed were critical steps if Apple was going to support apps on a platform that would eventually grow to over 1 billion devices worldwide and become one of the most valuable businesses of all time. As if that wasn't enough pressure, two weeks later, on October 17, Jobs publicly told developers that there would be an SDK available by February of 2008. It turns out it would actually be made available in March, and the App Store would launch later in July of that year.

At the time, Apple's market cap was around $150 billion. Today, it's more than $2 trillion, largely based on the success of the iPhone, which is based — at least in part — on the success of the App Store. For that reason alone, I think it's fair to say — in hindsight — that one-sentence reply has no doubt proven to be the most important email in the history of business.

From today's edition of Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: If you've been using open source software for any amount of time, then you're well aware of the tangled web of dependencies often involved in such projects. If not, there's any number of tools out there that explore just how interconnected everything is, and this week Google has jumped into the game with its own offering — an exploratory visualization site called Open Source Insights that gives users an interactive view of dependencies of open source projects.

Now, Google isn't the first to get into the game of trying to uncover and perhaps untangle the dizzying dependency graph of the open source world, but the company argues that it is more so trying to lay everything out in a way that developers can see, visually, just how, well, hopelessly screwed they really are.

"There are tools to help, of course: vulnerability scanners and dependency audits that can help identify when a package is exposed to a vulnerability. But it can still be difficult to visualize the big picture, to understand what you depend on, and what that implies," they write.

The Open Source Insights tool — currently "experimental" — gives users either a table or graphical visualization of how a project is composed, allowing them to explore the dependency graph and examine how using different versions of certain projects might actually affect that dependency graph. One of the benefits, Google notes, is that it allows users to see all this information "without asking you to install the package first. You can see instantly what installing a package — or an updated version — might mean for your project, how popular it is, find links to source code and other information, and then decide whether it should be installed."

Currently, the tool supports npm, Maven, Go modules, and Cargo, with more packaging systems on the way soon...

An anonymous reader writes: This week the GitHub Yearbook went live, with 6794 "graduates" featured on a special web page showcasing "any student who has graduated, or plans to graduate, in 2021... This includes bootcamps, code camps, high school graduates, Master's graduates, Ph. D. Graduates, etc." (Students were added by submitting a pull request — as long as they'd also signed up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack.) The first 5,000 graduates received "swag," including a custom holographic card with their GitHub stats.

But Saturday sees a special ceremony where these students will "walk" the stage at GitHub Graduation (starting at 9 a.m. PST). "We'll be hearing from special guests, giving out exclusive swag, and highlighting student stories and projects from around the world," explains the event's web page.

Calling it "a day to celebrate our craft, our community, and how technology moves the world forward," a post on GitHub's blog invites viewers "to welcome them to a global community of innovative thinkers and impactful builders." It acknowledges the special challenges of 2021, saying "This year, thousands of students from around the world came together and redefined the world we live in, how we learn, and how we move forward," adding "We are honored to be part of the experience and eager to celebrate this milestone...."

"During a devastating year, these graduates shined a light on what is possible. We saw project after project showcasing not only their skills, but also their passion and perseverance. This class is unstoppable!"

Marco Arment, a widely respected programmer, app developer and commentator on Apple, has analyzed Apple's arguments and its thinking as officially portrayed in its lawsuit against Epic. He writes: Apple's leaders continue to deny developers deny developers of two obvious truths: 1. That our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase commissions collected by Apple.
2. That any portion of our customers came to our apps from our own marketing or reputation, rather than the App Store.

For Apple to continue to deny these is dishonest, factually wrong, and extremely insulting -- not only to our efforts, but to the intelligence of all Apple developers and customers. This isn't about the 30%, or the 15%, or the prohibition of other payment systems, or the rules against telling our customers about our websites, or Apple's many other restrictions. (Not today, at least.) It's about what Apple's leadership thinks of us and our work. It isn't the App Store's responsibility to the rest of Apple to "pay its way" by leveraging hefty fees on certain types of transactions. Modern society has come to rely so heavily on mobile apps that any phone manufacturer must ensure that such a healthy ecosystem exists as table stakes for anyone to buy their phones. Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today.

If Apple wishes to continue advancing bizarre corporate-accounting arguments, the massive profits from the hardware business are what therefore truly "pay the way" of the App Store, public APIs, developer tools, and other app-development resources, just as the hardware profits must fund the development of Apple's own hardware, software, and services that make the iPhone appeal to customers. The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy. The "way" is already paid by the hardware -- but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip. And that's just business. Apple's a lot of things, and "generous" isn't one. But to bully and gaslight developers into thinking that we need to be kissing Apple's feet for permitting us to add billions of dollars of value to their platform is not only greedy, stingy, and morally reprehensible, but deeply insulting.

"To help realize the possibility of carbon-free applications, Microsoft, the consultancies Accenture and ThoughtWorks, the Linux Foundation, and Microsoft-owned code-sharing site, GitHub, have launched The Green Software Foundation," reports ZDNet: Announced at Microsoft's Build 2021 developer conference, the foundation is trying to promote the idea of green software engineering - a new field that looks to make code more efficient and reduce carbon emitted from the hardware it's running on... The foundation wants to set standards, best practices and patterns for building green software; nurture the creation of trusted open-source and open-data projects and support academic research; and grow an international community of green software ambassadors. The goal is to help the Information and Communication Technology sector to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% before 2030.

That includes mobile network operators, ISPs, data centers, and all the laptops being snapped up during the pandemic. "We envision a future where carbon-free software is standard - where software development, deployment, and use contribute to the global climate solution without every developer having to be an expert," Erica Brescia, COO of GitHub said in a statement. Microsoft president Brad Smith said "the world confronts an urgent carbon problem."

"It will take all of us working together to create innovative solutions to drastically reduce emissions. Microsoft is joining with organizations who are serious about an environmentally sustainable future to drive adoption of green software development to help our customers and partners around the world reduce their carbon footprint."
VentureBeat also points out that Microsoft "recently launched a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies."

But Bloomberg explores the rationale behind the new foundation: Data centers now account for about 1% of global electricity demand, and that's forecast to rise to 3% to 8% in the next decade, the companies said in a statement Tuesday, timed to Microsoft's Build developers conference... While it's tough to determine exactly how much carbon is emitted by individual software programs, groups like the Green Software Foundation examine metrics such as how much electricity is needed, whether microprocessors are being used efficiently, and the carbon emitted in networking. The foundation plans to look at curricula and developing certifications that would give engineers expertise in this space. As with areas like data science and cybersecurity, there will be an opportunity for engineers to specialize in green software development, but everyone who builds software will need at least some background in it, said Jeff Sandquist, a Microsoft vice president for developer relations.

"This will be the responsibility of everybody on the development team, much like when we look at security, or performance or reliability," he said. "Building the application in a sustainable way is going to matter."

Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Ubuntu has announced that, with immediate effect Ubuntu's IRC channels are moving to libera.chat. The move follows a "hostile takeover" of Ubuntu's namespace by Freenode's new management that appears to be happening to many other distributions including Gentoo as well as other projects that have used Freenode [including channels associated with the programming languages Raku, Elixir, and Haskell].

For Ubuntu, and many other FOSS projects, Freenode has long been one of the major official forms of communication... With IRC channels often used for important system advice, and project communication, this becomes not just an inconvenience but even a security problem. For this reason Ubuntu's replacement network, libera.chat has a more clearly open organisational structure than Freenode had before being taken over.
"All told, it appears something like 700 irc.freenode.net channels have been seized and re-permissioned," reports The Register, "supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy."

Wednesday Freenode owner Andrew Lee posted a blog post explaining that "in retrospect, we should have handled the action of closing down channels slightly differently..."

"The intent of doing this was not an attempt of a hostile takeover nor hijack like many people are saying. Since certain projects were disrupting their users' ability to chat on freenode via mass kicks, force closures, spam, we decided to enact this policy in those places which were deemed in violation and could cause an issue later...

"We believe we should have done this in a much more communicative way to circulate the right message and keep things transparent which of course did not happen. As we move forward I'd like to fully assure you that we will be working in complete commitment to restore projects, namespaces and channels that were closed on accident as a part of this event and we welcome them to use freenode as before as their very own homebase.

"Lastly, there are no excuses for this, and I'm willing to admit that I was wrong with Tuesday's move and apologize for the inconvenience that may have caused."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI shared plans to bring GPT-3, one of the world's most advanced models for generating text, to programming based on natural language descriptions. This is the first commercial application of GPT-3 undertaken since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI last year and gained exclusive licensing rights to GPT-3. "If you can describe what you want to do in natural language, GPT-3 will generate a list of the most relevant formulas for you to choose from," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a keynote address at the company's Build developer conference. "The code writes itself."

Microsoft VP Charles Lamanna told WIRED the sophistication offered by GPT-3 can help people tackle complex challenges and empower people with little coding experience. GPT-3 will translate natural language into PowerFx, a fairly simple programming language similar to Excel commands that Microsoft introduced in March. Microsoft's new feature is based on a neural network architecture known as Transformer, used by big tech companies including Baidu, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce to create large language models using text training data scraped from the web. These language models continually grow larger. The largest version of Google's BERT, a language model released in 2018, had 340 million parameters, a building block of neural networks. GPT-3, which was released one year ago, has 175 billion parameters. Such efforts have a long way to go, however. In one recent test, the best model succeeded only 14 percent of the time on introductory programming challenges compiled by a group of AI researchers. Still, researchers who conducted that study conclude that tests prove that "machine learning models are beginning to learn how to code."

James Bond has a new home: Amazon and MGM announced a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire MGM for $8.45 billion. From a report: MGM, founded in 1924, complements Amazon Studios, which has primarily focused on producing TV programming, the companies said. Amazon will help "preserve MGM's heritage and catalog of films," and provide customers with greater access to these existing works, the companies said. For Amazon, snapping up MGM -- which has more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows in its catalog -- is a way to supercharge its Prime Video service with a slew of well-known entertainment properties. In addition, Amazon is anticipating being able to tap into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer properties like the Pink Panther, Rocky, and, yes, the 007 franchises for new originals.

"The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of [intellectual property] in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM's talented team," Mike Hopkins, senior VP of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, said in announcing the deal. "It's very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high-quality storytelling." Hopkins noted that MGM productions collectively have won more than 180 Oscars and 100 Emmys. The studio has roughly 800 employees globally.